Tejo and Trancão Park by PROAP – Estudos e Projectos de Arquitectura Paisagista Lda

The Tejo and Trancão Park covers about 90 hectares on the right bank of the Tejo River, from the Vasco da Gama Tower, located on the southern border of the park, to the Trancão River, which forms its northern boundary, encompassing the EXPO’98 intervention area.

The intervention area was characterized by a set of deeply marking activities, unfortunately characteristic of marginal areas of cities, which had resulted in significant landscape and environmental degradation. Among other things, the area is in close proximity to the Tejo Estuary Nature Reserve, a site of inestimable ecological and landscape potential.

The proposal aimed to establish a spatial organization that offered great landscape, visual, and sensory diversity, supported by a structure that reflected coherence and formal unity. Land-modelling forms are the key structuring element: on the one hand they determine ecological, landscape and use consequences and on the other they define the meaning of the perspective landscape: three-dimensional, diverse, rhythmic.

These landforms, particularly those whose design is determined by the dominant wind direction, define, through their arrangement and orientation, not only a formal score, but more importantly an ecological rhythm that is repeated throughout the park, essentially through the contrast between gentle south-facing slopes and abrupt north-facing slopes. Planting zones and vegetation cover accentuate this contrast, matching types and specific floristic ensembles with corresponding ecological situations, anticipating the outcome that time and nature will take charge of establishing.

Since the goal was to create an intensely lived-in park, the trail systems introduced are necessarily artificial in order to bear an adequate ecological load. The trail system composes a hierarchical network that defines, in itself, an autonomous, functional structure, subsidiary to the three-dimensional structure with which it is inseparably articulated.

In addition to the ecological, functional and imagery meanings, the morphological structure also responds to the enhancement of the landscape system supported by the project through two key actions: the creation of visual corridors, realized as a negative structure with respect to the blocks of the built ensemble adjacent to the park; and the creation of landforms and large tree belts that open toward the pedestrian approach to the river.

We can say that Tejo e Trancão Park is PROAP’s ex-libris; it is the project that marked the internationalization of the firm and that enunciates one of the key principles on which the firm’s work is based: design is never an aesthetic gesture, an end in itself, but exists only as a manifestation and materialization of an idea (an intention) whose purpose is to react to the context, to solve a problem, to recognize a new meaning to an abandoned space. Only when understood in this way design is capable of building resilient spaces that survive neglect and enter the hearts of communities.

• All architecture offices involved in the design:
Heargreaves Asssociates

• Other credits:
SM&LM, Lacerda Moreira/Silvino Maio
Hidrotécnica Portuguesa, Lda
Ana Barroco e Esteves Correia
Vitor Jesus, GR, Lda, Grade Ribeiro
José Charters Monteiro
Aires Mateus e Associados, Lda
Alberto Souza Oliveira, Arq, Lda

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